Dustin Cook’s family drama is a brilliant and tragic picture of two sons forever strapped down to their mother. Too often has this image resonated where kids feel not only constrained to their parents, but dutiful despite their own unhappiness and lack of fulfillment. Cook’s short drama is immediately a compelling character study that explores how families can become a burden and how the children, grown or young, can be forced to forever keep their burden.
“Mother & Brother” focuses on two brothers, one of whom is about to get married to a perfectly fine young girl. His mother however is angry at the notion of the pair eloping, and insists that he not go through with the ceremony. Meanwhile, the younger of the pair of brothers is bound to their mother who sits in bed all day confined to her oxygen tank. He has to make her dinner, bathe her, and the like, all the while enduring the growing resentment she openly expresses toward both he and his brother for having the gall to grow up and seek greener pastures.
“Mother & Brother” paints complex characters with unhealthy relationships, all of which come crashing down in a finale that is quite heartbreaking but indicative of the genuinely harmful relationship the siblings have endured their entire lives. Filled to the brim with top notch performances (I especially enjoyed Lisa Goodman’s bitter and abusive turn), director Cook is a talent who pictures the study of dysfunctional family that’s right up there in insight with “August Osage County” and “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?”